Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Friday, August 27, 2010

Head of Special Forces Says Wars Slowing Hunt For Terrorist WMD

By Steve Hynd


Thus, the final prop under the cracked foundations of justification for two ongoing occupations disappears. From Bloomberg:



The effort to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists has been slowed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the head of U.S. special forces.


Fewer elite commandos are available for the hunt and their expertise has been degraded by �the decreased level of training,� Admiral Eric Olson said. They now have only a �limited� capability for this mission, he said.


Meanwhile, the threat of extremists acquiring and using chemical, biological or nuclear arms �is greater now than at any other time in history,� Olson told the Senate Armed Services Committee in a written response to a question posed by lawmakers after a hearing March 16 on his command�s budget.


Now the pro-war crowd can't even keep up the lame excuse that we're occupying the country next door in case Al Qaeda gets it's hands on Pakistan's nukes.


The final verdict has to be that both Iraq and Afghanistan have been national security disasters which should be ended as quickly as humanly possible.



No comments:

Post a Comment